


after the fall [we rise]

by senlinyu



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Accidental Pregnancy, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Porn With Plot, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Size Kink, Spoilers, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Epilogue, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, Virgin Ben Solo, Virgin Rey (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:55:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21890023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/senlinyu/pseuds/senlinyu
Summary: Continuation from the end of The Rise of Skywalker. Spoilers abound.There are so many things to say to him.All she can manage is his name.“Ben…”Her face breaks into a smile as she looks up at him.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 79
Kudos: 1012





	after the fall [we rise]

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [after the fall [we rise]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22001620) by [Cis_moll](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cis_moll/pseuds/Cis_moll)



> Beta work by Jamethiel. 
> 
> Many thanks to Musickat18 for consulting with me over some of the details.

Whatever Darth Sidious had done in the process of manipulating the Force to craft Rey into his vessel, when he dies it causes the Force to drain out of her. 

She stands, gasping, and feels herself dying; as though the destruction of Sidius has marked her irrelevant and now the Force is abandoning her. 

Erasing her. 

She feels it leave her body as she drops to the ground. 

_Ben..._

He’s her last thought as she’s collapsing. She reaches for the Force Bond that isn’t there anymore.

_Goodbye, Ben..._

Somehow she knows she will not follow in Master Luke’s footsteps and become one with the Force. 

It has left Rey Palpatine behind. 

As the darkened cave and ruins around her fade from sight, there is nothing on the other side.

* * *

Warmth and light. 

A beacon has been lit inside her. 

She reaches for it and feels a hand beneath hers. Her eyes flutter, and Ben’s face swims into view. His eyes are closed and she can feel the Force flooding through him and into her. 

_Ben. Ben. Ben._ His name feels like a heartbeat inside of her. As she grips his hand, his eyes open, and he stares at her, gaunt and exhausted. His dark gaze fastens desperately on her face. 

Her heart is racing now. She can still feel her death inside her veins. 

Her heart had ceased to beat, and the blood had stilled. Now she’s coming to life again. The synapses in her brain flicker alight as she feels the Force rushing through her, flooding from where Ben’s hands are pressed against her stomach and the base of her skull. 

_You brought me back._ She doesn’t say it, but she feels the acknowledgment between them. 

There are so many things to say to him.

All she can manage is his name. 

“Ben…” 

Her face breaks into a smile as she looks up at him. She’s wrapped in his arms and can’t help but pull herself closer, wanting to touch him. Her hands are shaking as her fingers brush against his cheek. He just stares at her as though she’s the whole universe.

Closer. 

She needs to be with him forever. She’s trying not to cry as she draws their faces closer and hesitantly kisses him. 

His lips meet her’s and this isn’t the vision she saw, but it’s better. It’s better than anything. 

She draws back and studies him, touching his face, and he smiles at her. She stares, drinking it in as desperately as she ever gulped water in the desert of Jakku. There’s a ravenousness inside her chest, the sharpest hunger she’s ever felt. She could watch Ben smile every day for the rest of her life. She wants to, more keenly than she’s ever hoped for anything. 

She hadn’t ever imagined him smiling. She’d had visions of him turning from the Dark Side and finding peace, but she never dreamed of him as happy. Now his large hand is warm against the back of her head, and he’s smiling from sheer joy that’s she’s alive again, wrapped in his embrace. His cheeks dimple under her finger as he stares at her and grins. The overwhelming sincerity of it makes her feel as though her heart will burst. 

Then something flashes in his eyes. A trace a regret inside him, and she can feel it. She takes hold of his hand, but before she can open her mouth, his expression goes blank, and he falls. 

She throws herself forward, gripping his hand as she realizes she can’t feel the Force in him. 

She stares in horror as she realizes what he’s done. He used their connection to pour his life into her. He gave her all of it, saving just a few seconds to say goodbye. To see her come to life. 

There has to be a way to share it. They could halve it. She’ll put some back. 

She grips his hand, trying to recall exactly how it felt in the moment he revived her. Hand on her stomach, and the base of her skull. 

She starts to reach and he’s—

Gone. 

His body vanishes. His clothes collapse empty beside her as the hand in hers disappears.   
  


* * *

It’s the dreams that haunt her most of all. 

“Rey…” His voice whispers to her when she sleeps. 

She reaches out and finds him, feels him. That rush. That light. She always knew there was light in him. 

It’s blinding. 

“Ben…” her voice breaks as she grips him. “Why did you do this to me?”

His lips brush against her cheek, and it feels real. 

That’s the worst part She could so easily let herself believe he’s there.

She knows she shouldn’t indulge in this, but she can’t help herself. 

She kisses him, the same way she kissed him the first time. Her fingers caress his face, and she tries to lose herself. His arms grip her, and his lips meet hers, and this feels so, so real. 

She always starts crying. Every night, she tries not to, but as he kisses her and his warm hands hold her, she always breaks down and sobs. He holds her in his arms, and her body is wracked and shuddering with all the grief. 

She wakes up sobbing. Alone. 

Nothing but her tears are real. 

He comes almost every night and seems to stay a little longer each time. 

* * *

The Force she wields isn’t hers, not any more than her life is. She feels Ben in it. His emotions and implacable passion. 

It’s part of why her grief is so raw. It’s Ben’s. She carries his emotions with her now, and they run so deep. Melded with her own emotions, it feels like too much to bear. 

She travels back to the Endor System to find his saber in the ocean where he threw it. It’s a piece of him to carry. Once she summons it from underwater, she deconstructs it and removes the cracked kyber crystal inside.

It’s willing to accept her, as though it senses its bond with Ben through her. She can feel an inherent connection as it readily latches onto the power of her grief, but she doesn’t want to carry the lightsaber of Kylo Ren. 

She mediates, trying to find a sense of peace to purify the connection. 

She pictures Ben on Exogol beside her as she manipulates the components. Ben rejected the Dark Side. He cast aside the darkness of the Sith and found peace. He crawled out of a pit and revived her with his life force. He smiled at her when she kissed him.

The crystal resists briefly and turns a yellow so pale it’s nearly white.

Not red or blue. Perhaps there is a kind of balance within her.

She goes to Tatooine to bury Luke and Leia’s lightsabers. 

The Skywalkers should be laid to rest. 

“There hasn’t been anyone here in a long time. What’s your name?” a desert crone asks, staring at Rey, her eyes suspicious. 

“Rey,” is all she says. 

“Rey who?”

Her throat tightens at the question. 

A scavenger. Rey of Jakku. 

Rey Palpatine. 

She is none of those things now. That person died. 

No one, she almost says. 

But she can feel Ben’s life in her veins. He died to bring her back. 

She can’t be no one. 

As she stands hesitating, she senses a shift in the Force and turns. 

The ghosts of Luke and Leia appear in front of her in the burnished desert, their white robes stark and ethereal against the reddening sky of the dual sunset. There’s an intensity in the way they stare at her that she doesn’t understand. 

_I’m a Palpatine. My legacy is nothing but ruin. Ben turned away from Kylo Ren and the Dark Side. He returned to the Light, and I robbed him of that life._

Somehow they don’t seem angry with her. There’s a sense of unity and expectation in their gaze, and she slowly begins to understand. 

The corners of her mouth turn up into a thin smile as she looks back to the crone. 

“Rey Skywalker,” she says in a steady accepting voice.

Because the Skywalker legacy sits on her shoulders, as heavy as the grief in her heart. 

There’s an empty sense of longing as she glances back at Luke and Leia, looking for Ben, hoping he’ll appear beside his mother. 

He isn’t there.

He never appears for her, until she’s afraid he regrets what he did. 

Or worse, that saving her stole away his chance of peace. He gave his life and his connection to the Force to her. Perhaps that means he cannot join his family in the afterlife. 

Without the Force, he couldn’t become one with it. 

* * *

“Why did you do this to me?” she asks again. 

He gives a huffing laugh low in his throat. “You would have done the same for me.”

She inhales. “I would have halved it. We would have been together.”

He always claims that it was impossible to measure out life that way. As though he knows anything about it. 

“What am I supposed to do now—?” Her voice breaks slightly, but she’s finally stopped crying every time he appears in her dreams. 

“Live,” he says with an easy shrug. 

There’s a peace about him that’s entirely unfamiliar. He’s without pain for the first time in his life.

She looks away. “I can’t go back. I can’t—be who I am.”

She’s still on Tatooine. It feels familiar; there’s enough of Jakku and enough Skywalker there to make life bearable. Water, trees, those things remind her of everything she’s lost. All the people she can’t bring herself to go back to and face.

She sent BB-8 back to Poe and Finn with a message of goodbye. A droid is not the company she wants.

Ben sighs. 

It’s difficult to believe he isn’t real. The presence of him is something she can physically sense even when she can’t see him. 

At first, when he’d come to her in her dreams, nothing is surrounding them. No ground. No sky. Just Rey and Ben in each other’s embrace. 

Now, he appears in the abandoned underground farm she’s currently sleeping in. 

One night he materializes in bed beside her, kissing her, gripping her close under his body. She feels the weight of his body pressing her down against the pourstone shelf she’s sleeping on. 

She wants to go further. She tries to strip him of the clothing he wears and press herself against his skin. He’s warm in her dreams, and the sands of Tatooine are bitterly cold at night.

She kneels on top of him, kissing him until her lungs burn, and pulling his shirt over his shoulders. She’s past caring that she’s indulging in a fantasy. It doesn’t matter. She wants everything she lost, and she will take it. 

She presses her palms against his chest, fingers outstretched, and runs her hands up his bare skin as she kisses him. 

He catches her hands in his larger ones and sits up. Caging her in his arms, pressing her against his chest. 

“Rey…” his voice is thick. He sighs heavily and rests his head against hers. “You have to move on. Let go of the past.”

“I can’t.” Her hands shake. “You took my soul with you when you died, Ben. I’m carrying your life inside me, every heartbeat that should have been yours.”

“Rey.” He brushes his lips against her cheek. “I brought you back so you would live.”

She pulls her hands free and kisses him more deeply, but he doesn’t respond, doesn’t reciprocate. 

She draws back, stung, and shakes him. “You’re supposed to be the selfish one. You’re the one who always wanted me to join you. Why are you holding back now? I’m giving you what you wanted.”

She shakes him again, and he still doesn’t move. He staring at her with that same expression of longing he’d had on his face the instant before he died. 

She can’t bear to look at it. 

She pulls away, turning her back on him and burying her face in her hands. “Do I have you, of all people, as my conscience now?” 

“You can’t stay here wallowing in you’ve lost,” he says. 

“I can do whatever I want.” She stands up and storms out of the dome into the freezing desert, staring up at the moons overhead. 

It’s bitingly cold. She starts shivering almost immediately. She closes her eyes and focuses. 

Ben’s power with the Force is so different from her own and yet she knows it intimately. The bond they’d shared, she felt the way he moved the Force. 

Her skin slowly warms. She stares up at the sky a few minutes longer before turning and going back inside. 

Ben’s there, dressed again. 

He eyes her warily. 

It’s like they’ve switched places. She was the one who was always willing to wait. Now he’s the calm one, the restrained one. She feels like fire, greedy and covetous. She wants what she wants, and she won’t wait for it anymore. 

She unwinds the sash around her waist, and the fabric around her shoulders slips off and pools around her feet. 

Ben’s expression darkens as he stares at her. “What are you doing?”

She unwinds the fabric around her forearms before kicking her boots off and pulling her shirt over her head. 

“Stop!” His voice is thick.

It makes her burn with determination. She only has the binding over her breasts and her trousers left to remove. 

“Why?” she says. Her voice is calm as her fingers hook under the band, and she pushes the fabric down her hips. “You aren’t real. You aren’t here. An imaginary version of you doesn’t get to run my life. I never asked you to save me.”

She’s standing in nothing but her underbindings now, and Ben’s expression is a conflicted mixture of rage and hunger.

He isn’t looking away. He doesn’t seem able to. 

“I’m the one who lives here. I didn’t ask you to always show up.” She tugs at the place where her chest bindings are tucked under and pulls it free. “Either disappear or do something.”

She isn’t sure what she’ll do if he vanishes and never comes back. 

She doesn’t think he will. He’s still staring at her, his jaw somewhat slack. 

She draws a deep breath and plunges. “Am I going to take the rest of my clothes off? Or will you?”

His mouth snaps shut, and he blinks and then stares wide-eyed. She unwinds the binding wrapped around her chest slowly, watching him. His throat bobs, and his hands start to move. He stills them. 

She follows the fabric around her chest again and it grows loose. 

She’s beginning to think she is going to end up stripping nude in a freezing desert for a man who isn’t there. She couldn’t imagine a more cooperative version of him?

She unwraps another layer of the bindings. He crosses the room so fast she barely sees him move.

His arm wraps around her back, dragging her against his chest as he captures her lips in a bruising kiss. She stumbles, and the rough pourstone wall bites into her skin as he pins her there, his mouth ravishing her. His long fingers grab hold of her chest bindings and rip them off. 

His mouth is burning against hers. His hands gripping her, palming her, drawing them impossibly close as his lips leave hers and he peppers kisses down her throat, over her shoulders. He sinks to his knees in front of her; his mouth running across her skin, his tongue tasting her. 

Rey’s head drops back, and she gasps, a strangled moan forming deep in her throat. Her fingers tangle in his hair as he kisses across her breasts. 

His hands are heavy on her hips, his thumbs trailing along her stomach down to her pelvis. He peels the remaining fabric down over her hips with a quick motion, and she’s stripped bare. 

He’s kneeling before her as though she were an alter. His mouth and hands searing and reverent as they explore her body. 

She doesn’t want to be worshipped. 

She wants him. Everything they should have had, everything they could have been together. She wants all of it now. 

She slides down and kisses him hungrily, pulling him across the room towards the thin padding and blankets on the pourstone shelf. She wrenches his shirt up over his shoulder and starts unbuckling the clasps on his slacks. As they reach the bed, she pulls his mouth against her and drags him down on top of her. 

She can feel him, hard and warm against her bare thigh. Everything feels so shockingly real. 

She hesitates. 

“I’ve never done this before,” she says in a tight voice, even though he has to know because he’s a figment of her imagination. 

He freezes and stares down at her. 

“Neither have I,” he says after a moment. 

She blinks up at him. “Slowly then.” Her voice catches nervously. 

He nods. 

Has she made him a virgin to account for the lack of experience she has on this subject? Mutual inexperience to deal with the fact she has no idea about what sex is supposed to feel like. 

Had Ben Solo never slept with anyone, or was it simply the case with this imaginary version that exists in her mind? She banishes the thought and kisses him. His fingers are gliding across her skin sending frissons of pleasure through her body. 

His hips roll as he palms her breast. She feels the size of his erection against her thigh. He’s really large. Surely she wouldn’t have imagined him that large…

Her mind stutters to a halt as he takes a nipple into his burning mouth and his fingers slide down between her legs. She tenses nervously, her thighs instinctively closing as his fingers reach their destination and trace along the seam with his fingertips—

_Oh..._

It’s good. 

It’s—

—very, very good. 

She’s touched herself, but this is different. His fingers are parting her folds, and she can tell that she’s wet. He’s making her wet. She gives a ragged gasp as one of his long fingers slides slowly inside her. 

She clenches and feels him moving, exploring her. His breath is heavy and warm near her neck as he touches her. His fingertip finds a spot behind her pelvis, and she gasps his name through her teeth, her hips bucking against his hand. 

He touches the spot again. She twists, a whimper forming in her throat. His thumb touches her outside, and she can’t explain the noises that escape her. 

“How do you—“ she can hardly form a sentence. “You said you hadn’t. How do you—know—?”

She can’t manage any more words. He keeps teasing her, but he looks up at her face. 

“I dreamed about this,” he says, his eyes dark. “I used to dream of having you in my bed.”

Her blood is thrumming. The cold of Tatooine is impossibly distant when there is such searing heat radiating from her. 

His mouth dips close to her ear. “I never wanted anyone until I saw you.”

His thumb presses at that spot between her legs, and her entire body shudders from the overwhelming pleasure of it. 

“I wanted you,” he whispers. “I wanted to know how to make it good for you so that if you ever let me touch you, you wouldn’t leave me afterward.”

His slides a second finger slowly inside of her, and the sensation of fullness is mind-bogglingly pleasurable. She gives a low gasp as his fingers slide back and then press in once more.

“There are—“ his voice has a hint of amusement in it, “a shocking number of files full of information on the subject if you know where to look. I had a datapad solely for the purpose of acquainting myself with the information.” His fingers pressed deeper and his thumb rubbed teasingly against the intensely pleasurable spot on the outside of her. “I imagined touching you.”

Listening to him describe everything he wants to do to her makes her heart race. His fingers keep moving, stretching her open. He slides three fingers into her. 

He’s preparing her. Finger by finger, opening her so that she can take him. She tenses at the thought, but the sensation of him inside her feels so good. 

Maybe it wouldn’t hurt. 

His other hand gently teases her nipple, and her thoughts stutter to a halt again. 

The tension inside her grows and grows and suddenly bursts, like the Force flaring out of her. Pleasure pulses through her every nerve as she spasms around his fingers. 

“Ben—Ben!” His name is on her lips, and she grasps at him, half-terrified he’ll vanish in the afterglow. 

He kisses her, and she holds him tightly, gripping him, willing him to stay. 

He slips his fingers out of her and slowly slides them into his mouth. She sees them shining with her fluids as they disappear. It feels like it should seem lewd, but instead it sends her pulse rushing at how much he wants hers. 

He withdraws his hand and touches her, and the wetness and the cool air makes her skin prickle. He kisses her again, and there’s a sharp tang on his tongue that’s her. 

He shifts between her legs, and she feels something hard and warm between her thighs. His eyes are locked on hers, watching her expression as he pushes inside. He goes very slowly, and he’s visibly struggling to control himself. 

Rey breathes steadily and wills herself to relax into the physical intrusion. This is what she wants, what she wanted. The fact it hurts a little just adds realism. 

Ben’s not dead. He’s with you. 

She moves her hips, and he moans. His hands grip her shoulders, and he tries to still her. 

“Rey, wait—“

She doesn’t want to wait. Pleasure is blurry and dreamlike, but the pain feels real. She bucks her hips sharply, and he sinks into her with a heavy groan. 

She gives a small gasp. It hurts a little, but it also feels incredible. There is the most delicious sensation of fullness. She feels Ben inside her, the weight of him on top of her. 

“Move. You can move. This is good,” she says, wrapping legs around his hips. 

His hips roll against hers. He slides back and then presses in deeper. She closes her eyes and feels it. 

He groans, and the sound rushes through her veins with every thrust until his hips jerk and she feels him throb inside her. Something warm fills her as his entire body goes rigid over her. He grunts between his teeth, almost sounding as though he’s in pain, and then collapses on top of her. 

She refuses to let him go. She wraps her arms around his shoulders and relishes the sensation of his body pinning her down.   
  


* * *

When she wakes in the morning, she’s naked and bitterly cold. 

Ben’s gone. The way he’s always gone. 

Her clothes are in a pile in the middle of the floor. She hops off the bed to grab them and nearly falls as a raw throbbing sensation between her legs suddenly asserts itself. 

She looks down and watches pearly white fluid begin sliding down her thighs.

Her heart is pounding with shock and she looks around the room. 

“Ben?” She croaks his name. 

“Ben?” She pulls her clothes on hastily and bolts outside. 

The desert is empty, searingly bright and barren in the late morning light. 

She screams his name again and again, but there’s no reply.

She closes her eyes and reaches out with the Force, trying to find their bond. Nothing.

“Ben…” She stands her chest heaving, trying to understand what’s happening to her. 

He’s not there. Not anywhere to be found. After hours of convincing herself, she heads to the settlement nearby and gets drunk. 

Ben doesn’t come that night.

She can’t sleep. She’s so desperate to fall asleep and find him, to confront him about exactly what’s happening, but she can’t fall asleep. She stays awake, her mind racing. When she does manage to drift off, it’s barely the lightest of dozes, and the slightest sounds and gusts of wind instantly wake her.

He doesn’t reappear, and days turn into weeks until she’s almost ready to give up. 

A warm hand rests on her shoulder, and he presses his face against her shoulder. She gives a dry gasping sob and buries herself in his arms. 

He’s real. He’s holding her. 

She hugs him fiercely for several minutes before leaning back to stare at him. “What did you do?”

He meets her eyes. “I’m not sure.”

She runs her hands over his shoulders and then touches his face in wonder. “You’re not a dream, are you? You’re–real. You’re here.”

He nods slowly. 

Her breath catches, and she hugs him again, trying to wrap her mind around it. 

“How?”

“I don’t know. When I’m not here, I don’t know where I am, there’s nothing. But when you’re asleep, I come here.”

Rey looks down at herself. “Am I asleep now?”

He shakes his head. “No. You’re awake.”

Her eyebrows furrowed. “Then why do you disappear?”

His face twitches. “It’s exactly easy to corporealize my entire body. If my concentration breaks...” He waves his hand in a vague gesture. “I’m still figuring out how to make it last.”

Rey feels hope flood through her. She reaches out until their hands brush together, feeling for him in the Force. He’s there, and yet–not. It’s not the Force bond they’d had. He feels like her. Rather than a connection, she can’t tell where she ends and he begins. 

She pushes more deeply, but there’s nothing to take hold of. He’s simply there.

She opens her eyes with a huff of frustration.

He’s sitting in front of her with that aggravatingly peaceful expression on his face. 

“Did you know this would happen?” She studies him.

“No. I thought the first few times, that it was simply part of the process of passing on. I thought it would be easier for you to just believe I was a dream. But instead, you kept calling me back.” He glanced around. “Wherever it is I am, when you sleep, you bring me back.”

She touches his face and smiles at him.

* * *

She tries to find a way to consciously call him, but it’s like moving a muscle that doesn’t exist. 

She loses her temper and smashes a large boulder to dust after she spends an entire day trying and failing. She stands in the ruin, her chest heaving as she chokes on the dust. 

How did he live with this much emotion? 

She stomps away and distracts herself with repairing a small moisture harvester than sits broken on the homestead she’s still squatting in. 

She’s certain that his presence has to do with the fact that his life force is in her. They’re one and the same now, but still separate in a way that only her subconscious seems able to manifest. 

When she calls him in her sleep, he’s able to stay for an indefinite amount of time until the connection wavers, and he abruptly vanishes. It happens once in the middle of sex, and Rey is so angry afterward that she nearly levels the entire building. 

She can’t figure out how to call him intentionally, and it’s driving her mad. It’s only in a certain state of sleep that calls him. If she’s drunk or tries to drug herself to sleep, he doesn’t appear. She has to fall asleep naturally, not too tired, not too awake. 

Her subconscious’ requirements are precise. 

* * *

“We have to get off this planet,” he says one day, lounging on the bed and eating her remaining food. 

“Why?” 

He looks up at her. “Why stay here? You’re not doing anything here. The food tastes like bantha shit.”

“You don’t have to eat it,” she says glowering.

“There’s nothing else to do. You won’t have sex anymore—just because I disappeared one time.” 

He’s extremely annoyed about that. 

Rey is determined not to sleep with him again until she figures out a way to bring him back if he happens to vanish halfway through. 

“We’ll go somewhere else. Where do you want to go?”

“My grandmother came from Naboo.”

* * *

She’s less angry when he’s around. He tempers her—which he finds exorbitant amusement in. 

“It’s not that funny,” she growls when he stands chuckling as the sight of a smoldering tree she attacked the previous afternoon after hours of unsuccessfully trying to reach out and find him. 

His eyes are dancing and alight. He grins at her, that smile that dimples his cheeks, and it feels like being punched in the heart. 

She grips him by the shirt and jerks him towards herself, kissing him. 

They’re more one and the same now than they were, which primarily makes him peaceful, and her emotional and moody. 

He stays present for days sometimes. She’ll wake up in his arms, and they’ll explore the forests and lakes of Naboo. 

He gradually, through persistent nagging, convinces her to have sex with him once more. She warns him that it will never happen again if he vanishes. 

The sex is really good. Just like everything between them is really good. 

He understands how much she feels. When she gets so angry she starts to lose it, he coaches her, helping her to control the raw intensity racing through her. 

“How did you handle feeling like this?” she asks. 

His hands are heavy on her shoulders, and she’s breathing slowly enough that the cliffs and boulders around them have stopped vibrating. 

“I didn’t,” he says. 

* * *

They stay in remote areas. They train and meditate. Ben complains frequently about her decision to bury two lightsabers in the desert, but he’s pleased by the fact her saber is built from his kyber crystal.

It’s all going well, aside from Ben’s random disappearances, until Rey wakes up one morning and proceeds to vomit on the floor. 

Ben puts her in bed and tries to feed her. Everything smells nauseating. 

“Rey…” he says slowly. “Didn’t you have a patch?”

“What patch?” she asks, wiping her lips. 

Ben turns slightly pale. “The contraceptive one.”

Rey and Ben stare at each other in horrified silence for several minutes. 

“I didn’t,” she finally says. “I never menstruated. And I didn’t have credits to pay for it anyway.”

“Well,” he says slowly, staring her with wide eyes before his eyes wander down to her stomach.

Rey sits frozen for several more seconds before abruptly bursting into tears. She wrathfully scrubs her face. “Do you do anything but make me more emotional?” 

He floats the bowl of porridge he’d been trying to feed her away to a nearby table and shifts closer, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. Now that his shock is wearing off, he looks absurdly pleased. 

One of his hands wanders down to touch her stomach.

She smacks it away, not yet ready to embrace the situation. “How is this even possible?”

“I’ve stopped trying to understand any of this. We’re a Force dyad. We were two that were one. Now we’re one that is two.”

She scoffs. “That doesn’t mean anything. You’re just stringing words together into nonsense.”

She feels his chest shake with suppressed laughter. 

She buries her face in her hands. “Stop laughing. This makes everything complicated.”

He pulls her closer. “We survived death. I think we’ll survive a baby.”

* * *

They do survive. 

They find a house in the lake country and begin fixing it up. 

Ben avoids disappearing for several weeks. He’s there when she falls asleep, and when she opens her eyes. 

Weeks turn into months, and Rey begins to think he never will again. 

She’s going to have a family.

Then he disappears, and she thinks he’s vanished again. She spends hours meditating and trying to find him. When she’s given up, he reappears.

He went hiking and hadn’t thought to mention he was leaving. 

She’s so relieved that she’s furious. 

It was one of those fights that had been a long time coming. Maybe even a lifetime.

There’s so much they haven’t dealt with. The whole war; that he’s a Skywalker and she’s a Palpatine; that he died. What is the future going to hold for them? What kind of family are they going to be? What kind of parents will they be?

Will he disappear someday and never come back, the way her parents did? Why is her whole life is comprised of waiting?

She’s full to bursting with hormones and Ben’s mercurial rage, and she turns apoplectic and throws everything at him. She says something about his mother and he snaps. 

She feels his rage through the Force. 

He opens his mouth and vanishes. 

“Ben?” 

She spends the day alternating between flagellating herself and meditating, trying to bring him back. She’s restless with worry and barely sleeps that night.

After five days, she’s frantic. 

Maybe she needs to seek out one of the old temples, somewhere with a greater Force connection. She starts packing. 

She leaves the house before dawn and makes her way quickly towards one of the smaller towns on Naboo. She’ll need more credits than she has to travel to any of the planets she has in mind. If she gets a job, she should be able to get there within a few weeks, assuming Ben hasn’t reappeared by then. 

She wants to believe he will, but she sleeps more heavily now that she’s pregnant. She can’t rely on sleeping in precise conditions for the rest of her life, pregnant, caring for a baby, growing older. 

There has to be a way to consciously bring him back. 

She stops in a large meadow and watches as the sun slowly rises, turning the world around her into pale gold. 

She has to find a way to call him. 

She closes her eyes and reaches out, the way she has hundreds of times in the past. 

He isn’t there in the Force to find. 

She inhales slowly. There’s something in all this that she’s missing. If she just understands it, she feels certain that Ben will reappear. 

What does she do in her sleep that she isn’t doing when conscious?

She closes her eyes again, breathing slowly. 

She doesn’t reach out and try to find him. 

They are one and the same. 

He is her life force. 

When she passed him the lightsaber through their bond, she didn’t reach. 

There was no distance between them to breach. 

They are a Force Dyad. Darkness and Light.

His life within her body.

They are _meant_ to be together. 

That’s something she knows fundamentally. Subconsciously. 

He's meant to be with her, so he should be. 

She opens her eyes—

—and he is. 

  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
